Jury Duty

Several weeks ago I received a very official looking piece of mail from the county small claims court.I almost threw it away as junk mail. Holy Cow! Now who am I in trouble with! No, wait, I’m not in trouble. I haven’t done anything so that makes me innocent. Then I remembered that being innocent doesn’t matter. OK, open it up and find out. It was a jury summons. That’s better. Someone else was in trouble. Me being on the jury insured that. No one in their right mind would want me to sit in judgment of anything. But, there it was. Report or else.Oh boy, I get to do something different and perform my civic duty at the same time.

I looked at the address and it didn’t seem right. The address was for Morrison Drive. The courthouse wasn’t on Morrison Drive. This place was in a bad neighborhood. Probably so everyone could walk to court. In this neighborhood, claims were settled by genfire and stabbing.

When I got there I felt that this might be the last time I saw the van. The place was scary. The building had a metal detector of course. The guy in front of me set it off like a fireworks demonstration. He tried to say something but the police officer told him to empty his pockets and try it again. Same thing. The detector went off.

“You see-,”he tried to say.

“Please, sir. Let me do my job. I’m a trained professional.” With that, she ran the handheld detector down one side of him and up the other. When she got to his head it went off. “Metal plate. It always sets these thing off. This is why I’m called Tinhead.”

We got to the courtroom and joined the others who’d been called that day. We all sat around twiddling our thumbs and dozing off. Then a clerk brought in some magazines for us to read while we waited. It was the last year’s supply of Good Housekeeping. That was the choice. Thank God, the judge came in and got our attention. He told us some facts about the case. One person whacked another with a car and they wanted some help from a jury to reach a settlement. Right. He asked us some general questions and then each of us some specific ones. I got the feeling that my answers seemed normal. They should have since I repeated what everyone else said. The plaintiff’s attorney opened with a description of the careless driving by the defendant that caused his client to lose control of her car and hit a fire hydrant. She didn’t require a lot of treatment but had been unable to work for the last two years.

“Mr. Smith, don’t snicker in my courtroom”, the judge admonished the defendant.

“Your Highness, she be lying through her teeth.”

“Sorry, your honor, I’ll keep my client under control. Sit down, you idiot.”

“But she be lyin.”

“So what? We’ll get our chance to lie later. Now, shut up!”

The plaintiff’s attorney entered affidavits from the police and the emergency room doctors. He entered one from her family doctor. Then he called her to the stand to describe the accident. She did a good job, a superlative job. If I didn’t know better I’d have believed it, the story was told so well. Thing is, you can’t bullshit a bullshitter. She’s lying. Later the defense attorney called his client to the stand to tell his side of the story. It also sounded very good. It was well said and made good sense. It was well rehearsed. He was lying too. Uh, oh.

In the jury room we had a problem. None of the six jurors wanted to be made foreman. It didn’t pay any more money so the heck with that. Finally we elected this one lady to be foreman. She’d been dozing and didn’t wake up in time. The next problem was coming up with a verdict. We didn’t believe either story. That was unanimous. The problem was getting four votes for one side or the other. Two favored the plaintiff based on better acting. Two favored the defendant based on better lines and direction. One wanted to convict them both if we could. Me? I just wanted to go home. The judge wanted to go to lunch.

We finally decided for the plaintiff. We awarded her no money. We didn’t give her anything for lost wages since, as the defense attorney pointed out, she’d not worked in a year prior and wasn’t looking for work.

Besides, she had stolen the car in the first place.